WASHINGTON — Americans should hold modest expectations about how much can be accomplished through military action and remain skeptical about the benefit to the armed services of technological improvements, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday.

In an address to students and faculty at National Defense University, he said the Pentagon had erred by favoring complex weapons systems that take years to develop. Instead, he said, the military should look for the “75 percent solution,” favoring less advanced technologies that could make an immediate difference in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gates’ remarks were in sharp contrast to the views of his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who believed high-technology advances could help shorten wars and allow conflicts to be fought with ever fewer forces.

“Be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish,” Gates said.

He urged his audience to have an “appreciation of limits” of military power, cautioning that although the U.S. has achieved huge advances in targeting and intelligence that have made attacks more precise, warfare is “inevitably tragic, inefficient and uncertain.”

The comments amounted to a critique of a military theory called “effects-based operations,” which contends in part that the government can craft military interventions to have a predictable impact.

“Look askance at idealized, triumphalist or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war: where the enemy is killed but our troops and innocent civilians are spared,” he said.

Noting Russia’s use of cyber-assaults alongside its conventional attack on Georgia, as well as Saddam Hussein’s use of tanks along with irregular forces in Iraq, Gates said the categories of war — regular and asymmetric — are blurring.

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